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“Did you know that time goes faster at the top of the building than at the bottom?”
Steve is hiking up the 24th - or was it 25th - flight of stairs when Dustin spits out the fact. It comes out garbled and strangled as he gasps for breath. It gives Steve pause and he leans into the railing only to have Nancy skip a step to throw her hand out in front of his chest, stopping him from resting his whole weight against the frame.
He watches as she gives it a hard shake, even kicks at one of the spindles - it doesn’t budge. “Gotta be more careful,” she says, almost teasingly, but Steve knows that Nancy has never spit venom - she doesn’t have to. Her eyes burn with something fierce, her brow quirking in a way that he feels properly chastised.
“Sorry,” he pants, craning his head to look out over the railing despite it all. Nancy’s lips slant into something soft before she flicks him between the brows and skips one more step to take the lead.
Below, across the winding staircase, Dustin catches Steve’s gaze, mirroring his position against the rail. Lucas leads Max to pass him.“The farther an object is away from Earth, the more quickly time passes.” Dustin says. He tips his head back further and Steve copies, looking up where the staircase continues to wind, only to end up destroyed in an apocalyptic skylight of decaying walls and some missing roof.
Steve chews on it for a second, then snorts. “What kind of logic is that?”
“Einstein’s theory of relativity.”
“So it’s a theory. Not a fact.”
“Well -”
Robin passes him on the stairs, her butterfly knife twirling lazily in her hand. “Listen, if all that’s true, then climb faster,” she calls behind her. “Because the sooner we get to the top, the faster this shit day ends.”
He wants to offer her some semblance of a smile, but she’s looking decidedly at the floor.
He waits for her to pass. “She’s got a point, dude,” Steve says, and his voice feels raw, like he’s been screaming, even though he hasn’t said more than a few sentences all day. “Before the sun sets would be ideal.”
“Yeah,” Max calls out, “There’s no way I’m letting a Demogorgon claw my other eye out.”
Unlike Robin, Lucas looks at Steve, his expression cracked and broken. They’re all worse for wear - Lucas’ left hand is bruised to shit, Steve’s got rope wounds all around his neck, and Eddie’s hopes of ever achieving a six-pack are done due to the amount of muscle that seems to have been clawed out of him.
The bandage covering Max’s left eye is dark maroon, dry blood staining in streaks down her cheek and under her chin. He mentally wonders who is gonna pull the short straw tonight to check just how much of her eye stayed in its socket and just how much ended up under Billy’s fingernails.
Dustin stomps his way up to meet him; the hat he normally wears is gone and when he bows his head to catch his breath, Steve notes a concerning wound on the top of his head - a good chunk of hair is gone with it. “There better not be any demobats up here. I don’t think I’ll make it,” he wheezes. “Not without a gun.”
Steve clutches the strap of his rifle closer to him. “You’re worse than El; you’re not getting a gun.”
“Dude, come on,” Dustin whines, latching heavily onto the railing to finish the trek on the last set of stairs that Nance deemed necessary to be considered safe ground. Steve braces himself for further arguing, but he’s lucked out - the kid is exhausted. He does, however, make one playful attempt to grab Steve’s pistol off his hip before he lets him clasp a hand to his back and push him toward the corridor.
Steve, however, lingers. He shouldn’t be yelling, shouldn’t be leaning over the railing, but he does it all anyway. “Eddie!” He hears Robin down the hall telling him to shut up. He whistles instead, sharp and high-pitched.
A few seconds later, Steve hears the return - a high-pitched yeehaw! followed by a string of indiscernible curses. “Babe,” Eddie groans. “How many staircases am I about to climb?”
“We gotta rebuild your abs somehow. Crunches aren’t enough.”
“Babe.”
“Twenty-four. I think.”
“Son of a fuck.”
Steve tries to catch sight of Eddie’s curly mop and the mossy top of Eleven’s shaved head. “How’s -”
Mind reader, he is. The perimeter is clear. You can tell Lieutenant Tightass and Seargent Killjoy that El and I collected approximately zero cans of food, killed zero demagorgons, and acquired zero medical supplies.”
He swears under his breath. “Not even a bandaid?”
“Dude, not even nail polish remover. But, we did find a new crown for Dustin’s massive noggin.”
“I’m still not sure it’ll fit,” El says and Steve can’t help his smile. Nancy shushes them this time.
He waits for them to finish the trek up the mountain of stairs. El, despite her forearm wrapped in a ripped t-shirt from a bullet that grazed her, looks sprightly; but anyone would standing next to Eddie. He’s pale, paler than usual, and he’s favoring his left side, but he’s not grabbing his stomach like he was a few hours ago. But that doesn’t really mean much. Eddie’s always been quite the stubborn ass.
“I got new books,” El tells him when she makes it to the top of the stairs and is confident that Eddie won’t keel over. Steve, though he illegally leaned against that railing, pulls Eddie away by the strap of his backpack - which is alarmingly heavy. “I couldn’t carry them all, so Eddie put some in his pack.”
Nancy had a rule that backpacks needed to be light with necessities only. Eddie, however, was constantly telling El and Max that they can fill their bookbags to the brim with whatever they want as long as they can run with it and are ready to part with it at any given notice in the event that they come across canned goods, fresh apples from a tree, or the elusive Hostess Twinkies that Steve isn’t convinced ever existed before the apocalypse.
It’s a rule Steve has let slide, but he’s a little disappointed that El made an injured Eddie her pack mule. He’s about to open his mouth when Eddie shoots him a look over her head, smile soft, and mouths I volunteered, and that’s that.
Wrapped around his finger, that girl.
So he just sighs instead. “Alright. Fill me in. What great American Novel did you find this time?”
“Several,” El gasps, yanking her backpack around to her front so she can dig inside. “I got Jurassic Park, Pride and Prejudice, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.”
Steve frowns, gently holding his palm up for permission to have the last one she named. “I know it’s been many moons since I’ve read one of these book things, but isn’t this the, like, third one in the series?”
El looks betrayed as she whips her head around to give Eddie the stink eye. “Hey,” he defends, “I searched that decrypt studio loft down to its petty little wooden bones. None of the other six were there. But,” he nods to the wrinkled, slightly water-damaged cover. “That’s the best one in the series anyway.”
“I don’t want to read them out of order,” El grouses, but she puts the book back in her bag all the same.
“They were mad popular. I’ll find the first one eventually.”
“You keep saying that, but you haven’t found any of the Lord of The Rings -”
“Shh! Don’t rub it in, Ellie.” They head down the corridor, passing doors ripped off their hinges and various amounts of rust on locks and knobs, following the sound of Dustin and Robin’s voices as they no doubt narrate their last swashbuckling adventure with the Demacreatures that led to Eddie’s ripped abdomen and Max’s ruined eye. “Listen, just start with Pride and Prejudice. That’s the best out of your haul.”
Steve vehemently disagrees, but he keeps it to himself. He knows Dustin and Max will want to listen to Lucas read Jurassic Park before any of the other choices and that will win in the end.
They make it to the last room in the hall - 259 - and Steve is immediately haunted, thrust into a time capsule of all that is Before. It’s been ransacked, as he assumes all these city apartments have been, but a lot of its character has been maintained in its decorations. The wall is covered in cheap art found in department stores back fifteen years ago, hanging crookedly and covered in dust; a framed vinyl of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors is cracked and broken against the wall.
Dustin and Robin are settled on the dusty couch and El makes a beeline for them, excited to share her loot where Nancy can’t uselessly reprimand her. She first pulls out the cap they found - it says Women Want Me, Fish Fear Me - and Dustin erupts into giggles. Eddie grunts as he sets his backpack down and Steve is surprised at the sound of rocks settling at the bottom.
“Apples,” Eddie says, opening his pack and pulling out tiny golfball sized fruits. “There was a tree two blocks down.”
He throws one both to Robin and Dustin, but since it’s them and Eddie is Eddie it just hits Dustin in the nose and Robin in her boob. She looks at it with…well, Steve wouldn’t call it disgust. But she’s skeptical. “You call this an apple?”
“Uh, yeah?” Eddie momentarily presses his palm against his side. “It’s a crabapple.”
“What the fuck is a crabapple.”
“A little, tiny, crab-sized apple. Please,” he scoffs with his usual flair. “Don’t you all thank me at once.”
Dustin shrugs and takes a bite, which by their size means he almost swallows it whole while Robin inspects it further, squinting like she’s evaluating a diamond. “Are you sure this isn’t a whole Dogs and Grapes situation? Are these even edible?” And then Steve gets the fantastic view of Dustins spitting his apple back out into his hand.
“Dude,” Steve reprimands softly. “They’re fine. I’ve eaten them before. They’re just -”
“Sour,” Dustin pulls a face, but he isn’t wasteful, and he licks the mess back up. “But I’ve had worse. Thanks, Eddie.”
Robin simply shrugs, but eats her apple as well, which convinces what must have been an apprehensive El. This time when Eddie throws one, she catches it before she snuggles herself between Dustin and Robin to enjoy her tart little fruit.
“Infirmary’s thataway,” Robin nods toward the hall. “I think Nancy found some peroxide. Or nail polish remover.” and Eddie’s Hah is garbled around his own bite of crabapple.
Steve figures he can spare Eddie’s abdomen for a moment - with three of them already in the bathroom, he can’t imagine there’s much room for two more. Memories of Max’s face before he and Lucas put the makeshift bandage on her eye make him queasy, make the smell of tart crabapples smell like acid, but he breathes through his mouth, short and quick, and then finds his nerve.
“How we doin’?” He asks quietly, leaning against the door jam. They have Max sitting on the lid of the toilet while Nancy hovers in front of her; Lucas is sitting on the vanity, holding Max’s hand.
There’s a rag in her hand and a bucket by her feet. Where Nancy got the water, he doesn’t know, but she’s always like that: Brain that moves at the speed of light - she’s on Plan LMNOP while the rest of them are trying to think of B. She and Dustin are alike in that way, only where Dustin flails and lets fear get the best of him, he’s never seen Nancy hesitate.
Until now.
She’s posed with the rag - water, peroxide, acetone, who the fuck knows - inches away from Max’s face, The messy rags once covering her face are gone and the three of them are left to look at what’s left of Max’s eye.
It’s not pretty.
“I don’t know what to do,” Nancy finally admits. “I mean, it’s still there -”
“It is?” Max is surprised. She tries to turn her head to catch her face in the mirror above the vanity but Lucas simply tips her head back toward Nance, kissing her hand in apology.
“I mean, it’s not going to be the same,” Nancy amends. “Nothing is going to make you see out of this eye again. But,” she sighs. “It’s still there. It’s still….open. But I can’t just pour peroxide on your eye.”
Nancy chews on her lip in thought before she begins wiping the blood on Max’s face with the rag - a lot of the blood came from her eye, but a lot more came from deep cuts around her face - those can have peroxide poured on them, and she gets to work. “Luke,” she finally says, not looking at him. “Go find the cleanest piece of clothing you can find. Tees, something soft. Wash the hell out of it. Find lots of soap. Look in every damn apartment in this building for it,” This time, she looks at him. “I’m not kidding. I’ll even take bleach. Dry it someplace clean. Make sure it’s dry before it touches her face. It’s all we got to wrap her with until we find Jon.” She sniffs and nods toward the door. “Take anyone else but Eddie to help. He needs stitches, despite what he might say.”
Before Lucas has a chance to leave, he catches him by his shoulder in the doorway. “Dustin stays too,” Steve says. “I saw his scalp. I gotta make sure none of his brains oozed out.”
“If any of it did, here’s to hoping it was the annoying parts,” Max quips.
After the incident, Max was gripped with pain and fear that Steve hadn’t imagined he would see in any of them - it’s a kind of horror that typically paired with instant deaths. But she’s hardened her expression, any minute detection of pain buried under dried blood as they made their trek to a safe place to stop. Now she’s here, shoving her pain down, quipping about Dustin like nothing’s different.
But he knows.
“Eddie puts up less of a fight when you clean his wounds. Can you go get him ready, then I’ll do the stitches?” Nancy snorts but nods, slipping out of the bathroom.
With her and Lucas gone, some of Max’s resolve starts to crumble. She takes a shuddering breath and her lip begins to quiver. She isn’t so stupid as to hide pain when something is wrong - she’s spoken up when she cut her hand or twisted her wrist, but she’s made it clear that she doesn’t believe in crying over things that she can’t control. he says it slows them down, or worse, distracts and worries others. Max doesn’t like to make anyone worry, especially Nancy (out of admiration) and Lucas (out of love).
But Steve’s different, has been from the start. They gravitated towards each other - Robin says he filled the brother-sized hole in her heart that Billy could never fill, and took on the role of a pseudo-dad since hers was never there to begin with. Steve never denied that he cared for her - he’s told Eddie she’s his favorite of the kids in confidence, but Eddie told him it wasn’t exactly a secret. He doesn’t know why though. He’s twenty-five with no desire for kids, an only child his whole life without ever possessing envy of Nancy, especially with the horror stories she’s told about Mike.
“Love comes in all shapes and sizes,” Robin tells him. “Look at us. Couple of platonic soulmates. It’s never easy to explain, is it?”
So here Max is, lip wobbling and unshed tears pooling in her good eye. Her hands shake as she lifts them up and signs, “It hurts.”
He can’t even imagine. They’ve all been worried about demagorgon sightings and demobat attacks and it’s her brother, freshly bitten and newly infected, that doesn’t even have to bite her to ruin her. It happened so quickly. A pounce. A swipe. Then Nancy’s shot right to the back of his head.
There had to be so much hurt.
“Aw, bud,” he says with care, but he signs her name back. “I know.” He crouches in front of her, making sure she can see him well with her only eye. “You are so brave,” he tells her, hands moving with a flourish. She usually doesn’t like being treated so young, but she's still just fourteen like the rest of the kids. And kids need extra care. “I’m so proud of you. You’re gonna be okay.”
He pulls out his flask from the inside of his jacket and offers it to her. “It’s all we got for pain medicine,” he tells her. “Sip on it. But be careful. We need you alert.”
She takes it, has one little sip, and then slips it into her own pocket. “Do you think having one eye,” Max says, too tired to sign completely. “Is like having one ear?”
Ironically, Steve has his head turned to his left to pick up what she says with his right. “It’s a piece of cake,” he says, curved hand sliding across his upturned palm. “I've gotten by these last ten years just fine. You will, too. The only thing is you might have to work harder to beat Lucas at hoops.” He flicks his wrist like he’s shooting the ball.
“You think I can still beat Dustin?”
“You don’t need eyes or ears to beat Dustin at basketball.” She’s amused, he can tell, but her pain is overwhelming. She hunches over and her arms are weak and slow to come up, but Steve takes the hint. “Okay, up we go. C'mon, kiddo.”
He gets her off the toilet seat and holds her under her arms, not loving the way she feels bonier than he remembers from the last time he had to pick her up due to the adventures of rotten wood and sprained ankles. He lifts her completely off the ground and into his arms, carefully walking them back to the couch in the living room where a feast of crabapples awaits her. “We’ll get you to a doctor soon, and he’ll make sure your eye doesn’t make you sick. I promise.”
Her face is in the crook of his neck, chapped lips by his good ear. “You can’t promise that.”
“I can, and I did. You’re gonna be okay, Max. I promise.”
Steve catches Nancy’s disapproving look as he settles her on the couch beside Eddie, whose shirt is rolled up and wounds are coated in peroxide. It only takes a glance to know where he’s gonna need the stitches. “I think a few french knot stitches should do the trick,” Eddie says. “I’ll accept Continental if you’re too tired.”
“It’s your skin. Not embroidery.”
“Aww. Does that mean I don’t get it done in the shape of a little rabbit?”
Steve rolls his eyes, fond, and settles Max beside Nancy - he ignores her eyes as he drops a kiss on Max’s forehead, careful of her wounds. “Try and eat an apple. You’ll feel better. I promise,” and this time Nancy doesn’t bother to keep her sigh to herself.
Eddie follows him back into the bathroom and he hops up onto the vanity with all the vigor of someone who isn’t injured. His wince proves that he regrets it. “There’s a bajillion of them, but there’s only two that are really deep,” Eddie explains. “Should be fine. Any antibiotics we find from here on out, go to Max.”
Their suture kit is the only acceptable medical kit they have on them these days. “Tricky wound,” he grouses, but he’s not talking about Eddie. Can't even imagine how antibiotics would work on her kind of wound. He sanitizes the needle with the peroxide and gets to work.
“I know,” Eddie sighs. “But listen. I know Nancy’s gonna chew you out later for your promises, but just know I’m on your side. She’s got no chance if she doesn’t believe she has one.”
Eddie and Nancy are the definitions of Good Cop and Bad Cop - he and Robin fall somewhere in the middle. Their arguments are always civil, and while they tend to get on Dustin’s nerves for being time-consuming, Steve is always grateful for them. It forces the kids to view their options from every angle. They need to be cautious, vigilant, and smart. Nancy makes sure of this. But they also need to be kind, open, and willing to have fun - Eddie makes sure of this. Steve tries to catch a balance.
“You’re thinking real hard there, baby,” Eddie says after the first wound is done. “I can almost hear the gears turning. The wires short-circuiting.”
“I’m concentrating. Bunny ears are tricky.”
Eddie has to know it’s a joke, but the goofball looks down to double-check all the same. “We’re gonna get there. All of us. Alive. El will meet with Dr. Owens, they’ll get a cure, and then we can head back to Jackson. Show Nancy and the rest of them what they’ve been missing. I’ll see if I can get my trailer back.”
“I don’t know a lot, but I do know they bulldozed that thing the moment we left.”
“Well, they sure as shit better have taken my guitar out of there before they did. It was a Gibson.”
“I’m sure Uncle Wayne spared it. Along with your novelty Garfield mug and your coin collection.”
“Ugh, that mug. I miss that mug. I miss that trailer. The stories she could tell.”
Steve’s mind briefly rolls around the stories the others have told him. How they fell together as a group feels a bit of a whirlwind with a dash of fate, seeing as they’ve all come from different parts of the country. The four kids grew up in the Chicago QZ. Nancy was there often as well, but from her stories, Steve knows she’s bounced around from QZ to QZ on missions and tasks she’d rather not talk about. Robin and Steve - well, they’ve been doing this for as long as he can remember. Vagabonds, with families that left them on outbreak day. Eddie’s been in Jackson, Wyoming, a safe haven town with electricity and food and no infected, since Day 0. His uncle, a ranch hand his whole life, welcomed the two of them with open arms when they stumbled upon their country paradise about five years ago.
His mind settles on his early days in Jackson, trying to teach Robin to ride a horse. “They’ll love the horses. El’s never gonna get off one. Dustin’s gonna get a hoove to the face.”
Eddie leans forward and smacks a kiss on Steve's lips. “And all will be right with the world.”
It's not enough of a distraction. Steve, mind still racing, asks, “You think that’ll ever happen? The world righted?”
Eddie blinks. “ I mean with the cure - “
“Do you really believe they can cure this shit?” Steve goes in for another stitch, but he’s shaking a bit so he pulls back and takes a break. He dares a look at Eddie, whose face is impressively passive. “I-” he swallows thickly. “I’m still trying to believe we’re gonna find Jonathan and the lot alive.”
It’s not pleasant, thinking of their downfall, especially considering what it would mean for Nancy. Jonathan, Mike, and Will mean everything to her. And last he checked, they didn’t know of Hopper and Joyce and Argyle were still with them, still -
The point is: it’s not pleasant, thinking about it.
“El believes it,” Eddie says softly. “Her immunity for a cure, Jonathan being alive, Owens to pull it all off. A happy home back in Jackson. All of it. For me, right now, that’s good enough.”
Steve sniffs and clenches his jaw. He rolls his shoulders a few good times before he ignores his aching back and gets back to finishing the stitches. He was skeptical when Hopper showed up to Jackson with a girl who was immune to these monsters. But he's seen her scars and knows it to be true. But despite it all, it feels like a miracle, something that can't be replicated. And, it was with hurt and anger Hopper revealed she's even this way at all because of experiment and design - eleven. Her name, but simply Brenner's attempt. It's all fucked up from the start, and he just doesn't know how much further they'll go for the cause.
Whatever it is, he hopes it's won't leave her scarred and in need of stitches. There are some wounds he can't heal.
“I’m afraid of what it will cost her,” He finally says. Her spirit. Her joy. Her life.
But Eddie is greedy in a way he wishes he could be. “Nothing,” Eddie shrugs. “We’ll make sure of it. I promise.”
He says it so casually, but there’s a dark tone to it, protective colors that rarely break free from Eddie. It’s not just a promise. It’s a threat.
And Steve, who has walked across this country and back with an axe in his pack and a gun slung over his shoulder, knows threats like the back of his hand.
For him, right now, it’s good enough.
He finishes the stitches in silence and Eddie, still pale, but not to a degree where Steve thinks he’s gonna drop like a fly, takes a few shaky breaths before he gives him another kiss, puts on a smile, and jogs back into the living room with every intention of making the kids laugh until they fall asleep.
Bad Cop always follows Good Cop, so Steve figures he won’t get to jump into Eddie’s escapism quite so easily. Lucas has returned with Robin, and it seems they have already given Dustin the all-clear for his head and have taken to playing keep-away with his new hat. El is curled up beside Max, Jurassic Park open to page one, and Nancy’s brow shoots up in a way that says we’ll talk later, cowboy, and he figures he can live with that. For now, they’re unbitten and undead. They’ll bask in it a little longer.
“Dusty!” Eddie barks as he scrapes through his pack for his harmonica. “Hit me with some knowledge.”
El’s book collection consists of giant novels, while Dustin holds on to the same book - 500 Wacky Science Facts - that he uses as jump-off points to talk about anything and everything. These days, he rarely even needs to reference it. “Did you know clouds can weigh up to a million pounds?”
Eddie huffs out a loud note on his harmonica. “Can’t be true. They’re too fluffy.”
“What!?” Dustin squawks. This is a regular routine - Lucas or Eddie straight up calling him a liar, but it bugs him all the same. Dustin loves to be right. “It definitely is true. Do you know how massive clouds can be?
“Pretty big. Bigger than, like, a plane,” And Robin snorts out a laugh.
“Right. And water can be heavy.”
“True. I’ve seen a lake. Heard of the ocean.”
“Clouds are made of water.”
“I’m following.”
“Consider a thunderstorm, how much rain falls. That’s heavy.”
Eddie makes a hiss of uncertainty. “But they’re so wispy.” Dustin groans at his antics. “Like cotton candy,” Eddie keeps going. “The dark ones are just flavored. Or something.”
“I hate you.” Dustin whips out the book and flips through the pages, desperate for a fact that Eddie will, for once, take at face value. “Here’s one - it can rain diamonds on other planets. They think over two million pounds of diamonds rain on Saturn every year.”
“Now I bet those clouds weigh a million pounds.”
The group snickers (even Nancy cracks a smile) as Dustin sticks his nose in his book once more. “What about this: there are more trees on Earth than stars in the galaxy.”
Eddie spits out a few more notes from his harmonica - Steve recognizes the tune. Georgia On My Mind. “Okay, that one’s true. For sure.”
El’s face lights up. “Really? Because I read there’s a lot of stars.”
“Sure,” Eddie says between a few more notes. “But you, little miss, haven’t seen Jackson. I’m tellin’ you, once you’ve saved the world and come back to our place, I’m gonna put you on your finest horse and take you out to the mountains and you’ll see - the view is insane. Half the trees on this planet are scattered along that horizon, mark my words.”
El gives a dreamy sigh and slouches in contentment - an already drowsy Max slumps against her shoulder and El moves to let her easily curl against her to drift off into sleep. “I can’t wait. Hopper is gonna love it. It’s gonna be awesome.”
If Eddie’s thrown by his mention, he doesn’t show it. They aren’t all sure what happened. Dustin and Robin and optimistic. Nancy and Steve are not. Regardless, Eddie smiles and lifts his harmonica back to his face, playing a few more notes before he puts it away - he knows it makes Nancy nervous when they’re in a city. He’s not entirely uncruel. “Who has got the first watch?” he asks.
Usually, there’s a fight between Steve and Nancy, but Steve’s already got his rifle in his hands. “Me,” he says softly. He shoots Nancy a pleading look. There’s no way he can sleep, not right now.
“Cool,” Eddie says, settling on the floor, his pack a pillow. “Wake me up for my turn.” Eyes closed, he still manages to point a finger Steve’s way. “I mean it, Harrington. Or I will rain two million pounds of diamonds on you.”
Lucas ends up settling on Max’s other side, and Nancy and Dustin huddle beside Eddie. Robin waits for them to fall asleep - about five minutes - before she grabs her own rifle and comes to sit beside Steve, propping her back against his - the same way they’ve slept nearly every night since they got back on the road. “Hey, Steve?” she whispers.
Robin isn’t Good Cop or Bad Cop. She’s just Robin - his other half. He knows her like the back of his hand and always knows what she’s about to say before she says it. But he lets her say it anyway. Always. “Yeah?” he whispers back even more quietly.
“...Maybe it’s time to give Dustin that gun.”
He replays the day's events in his head. Counts the centimeters of space he saw between Max’s neck and Billy’s teeth before that bullet went through his brain. Good Cop or Bad Cop, hope or no hope, one thing is certainly clear - things are getting more dangerous. And they can’t afford another close call.
He wants them to be kids. Protect them from violence. But he needs them to be alive.
“Yeah,” Steve swallows thickly. “I’ll teach him tomorrow.”
And maybe it’s useless, but he borrows some of Eddie’s hope and prays they’ll make it to Jackson without Dustin ever having to use it. He stays up all night, taking Eddie’s shift, and prays that they’ll all make it without losing another piece of them.
(And several months later,
when they’re escaping a hospital with an unconscious El in Eddie’s arms,
Steve will realize there was always a greater chance of it raining diamonds than it ending well for them.)